Every Teacher With An ELL Student In Their Class Can Benefit From Watching This Video!

This video demonstrates instruction that is made comprehensible and instruction that is not comprehensible. The demo uses a different language so viewers can feel what an EL may experience in the classroom.

I think any teacher who has an English Language Learner in his/her class can benefit from watching it. I’ll certainly be using it in the ELL Methods class I teacher in University teacher education programs.

Ted Appel, the former principal of our school and one of the sharpest people I know in education, watched the video and made this useful comment:

This is good on a lot of levels. Teachers need to understand, and this may seem strange that it needs to be said, that the objective is for students to understand and be able to do what is being taught. I think some teachers believe the objective is to “teach it” as opposed to the goal being students “learn it”. As you well know, they are not synonymous. I wish she had also mentioned and demonstrated monitoring along the way to see if what she was teaching was actually being comprehended.